Hillary Clinton’s email probe took an interesting turn Thursday when emails released by watchdog group Judicial Watch showed that the former Secretary of State chose to use an unsecured home server despite being aware of the security risk it posed, according to The Hill.
The emails have been accessed by Judicial Watch as part of a lawsuit filed by the conservative group against the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act.
In an email exchange between Hillary Clinton and her then-Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, the former Secretary of State, after having returned from an overseas trip, asks Mills to connect with her over an unsecured line after initial attempts to get in touch over a secure line failed due to technical glitches.
“I called ops and they gave me your ‘secure’ cells… but only got a high-pitched whining sound,” Clinton wrote to Mills, acknowledging that she could not gain access to her over a secure line.
“I just spoke to ops and called you reg line – we have to wait until we see each other b/c [the] technology is not working,” Mills wrote back, suggesting Hillary to try the secure line again.
But the former secretary wrote back saying that she couldn’t wait any longer.
“I give up. Call me on my home #,” Clinton wrote to Mills.
“I give up. Call me on my home #": Clinton abandoned secure line to use home phone https://t.co/7UPq4j6rTs pic.twitter.com/cg5A3J81h6
— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) May 12, 2016
Although it is still unclear if Clinton and Mills connected over a line that was not secure, critics believe the present episode aptly demonstrates that the former Secretary of State resorted to “unsecure forms of communication out of convenience, potentially jeopardizing sensitive information.”
Fox News reports that the email exchange between Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills is reminiscent of another email exchange between her and then-State Department deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, where she directed Sullivan “to strip the classification markings of sensitive talking points and send through non-secure fax.”
“They say they’ve had issues sending secure fax. They’re working on it,” Sullivan wrote to Clinton in 2011.
“If they can’t, turn into nonpaper w no identifying heading and send nonsecure,” Clinton wrote back.
Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, said in a press statement after the release of Thursday’s emails that Clinton could have repeatedly used unsecured lines to connect with her aides during her tenure as the Secretary of State.
“This drip, drip of new Clinton emails show Hillary Clinton could not care less about the security of her communications. How many other smoking gun emails are Hillary Clinton and her co-conspirators in the Obama administration hiding from the American people?”
According to an earlier report in The Inquisitr, Cheryl Mills, whom Clinton corresponded with in the email exchange released Thursday, walked out of an FBI interview briefly when an official broached a topic considered off-limits. It is not yet known if the questions involved the present email exchange, but reports suggested that Mills was not willing to address inquiries related to the “procedure used to produce emails to the State Department so they could possibly be released publicly.”
Clinton aide Cheryl Mills walked out of FBI interview when they asked about procedure to release emails publicly https://t.co/l4HsXaABNF
— Justin Miller (@justinjm1) May 10, 2016
The emails released Thursday are not part of the 30,000 messages released by the State Department in recent months, raising further questions on whether Hillary Clinton deliberately withheld information from investigators.
[Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images]